Both are valid. Quote from xml.com:
A resource may have more than one
representation. There are four
frequently used ways of delivering the
correct resource representation to
consumers:
- Server-driven negotiation. The service provider determines the right
representation from prior knowledge of
its clients or uses the information
provided in HTTP headers like Accept,
Accept-Charset, Accept-Encoding,
Accept-Language, and User-Agent. The
drawback of this approach is that the
server may not have the best knowledge
about what a client really wants.- Client-driven negotiation. A client initiates a request to a
server. The server returns a list of
available of representations. The
client then selects the representation
it wants and sends a second request to
the server. The drawback is that a
client needs to send two requests.- Proxy-driven negotiation. A client initiates a request to a server
through a proxy. The proxy passes the
request to the server and obtains a
list of representations. The proxy
selects one representation according
to preferences set by the client and
returns the representation back to the
client.- URI-specified representation. A client specifies the representation it
wants in the URI query string.